The Internet is a global interconnection of computer networks that share a common set of communication protocols. Most computers on the global Internet use the Transport Control Protocol layer and the Internet Protocol layer commonly referred to together as the TCP/IP standard protocols. By sharing a set of nonproprietary well-defined data communication protocols, the Internet allows almost any computer system to communicate with any other computer system.
The Internet and its predecessor, the ARPANET, has existed in some form since 1969. The Internet was mainly used by scientists and engineers until the late 1980s. In the late 1980's and early nineties when personal computer systems became powerful enough to handle networking, a wider audience of users began using the global Internet. Initially, most users used the Internet for electronic mail (email), file transfers, discussion groups, and email using the simple mail transport protocol (SMTP), the file transfer protocol (FTP), and the network news transport protocol (NNTP), respectively.
One particular transport protocol, known as the hypertext transport protocol (HTTP), was created for sharing hypertext markup language (HTML) documents. The creation of HTTP and HTML enabled Internet users to easily create media-rich documents that could easily be “browsed” using an HTML browser program. Each HTML document could refer to other HTML documents using hypertext links (hyperlinks). By linking together HTML documents located on various servers throughout the world using embedded hyperlinks, a “World Wide Web” (WWW) of interconnected hypertext documents was created. Due to the simple, yet very powerful nature of HTML and HTTP, the World Wide Web (WWW) portion of the Internet has grown into the most popular form of Internet communication.
The WWW portion of the Internet quickly became a new mass medium for information distribution. With the help of advertising support, millions of news and information web sites have been deployed on the global Internet.
The HTML and HTTP standards have been amended to handle two-way communication. Specifically, an HTTP server may present a user with an HTML “form” that can be filled-in by the user and sent back to a server. Using a processing system often known as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script, the HTTP server may parse the returned HTML form to obtain the information entered by the person.
These interactive HTML and HTTP techniques have been used to create commercial WWW sites that can perform financial transactions. For example, a retailer may create a set of HTML documents that describe various products available for sale. The retailer may then provide HTML form documents that allow a user to specify a desired product, provide a shipping address, and provide a credit card to pay for the desired product. With such commerce based Internet web sites, the Internet has become the new frontier of commercial commerce.
Internet based commerce has been growing at an exponential rate. To provide highly automated web sites, Internet commerce vendors have gone far beyond the original static web pages. Most Internet commerce sites now dynamically create web sites to allow current promotions, personalized user information, and other dynamic information to be placed into web sites. Such complex dynamic web page design and implementation is nontrivial process. Once a dynamic web site has been created using a specific architecture, it is very difficult to change to a different architecture. Thus, it would be desirable to have better tools that would allow such complex web sites to be created and edited.